San Francisco’s latest attention grabber is not a splashy startup launch or a robot on wheels, but a set of stark, monochrome billboards asking a simple question: “AI Dread?” along with a phone number. Callers who dial in are routed to a prerecorded hotline that plays office sounds and asks them to leave voicemails about their anxieties. In a city already flooded with provocative AI advertising, the quiet little stunt has managed to cut through the noise.
The mystery buyer behind the signs turned out to be productivity software unicorn Notion. The company says the point is to soothe existential AI dread, not to hawk subscriptions, according to The San Francisco Standard. Co-founder Akshay Kothari told the outlet that Notion is not trying to sell you Notion through this campaign and described the firm’s AI agents as tools to clear away busywork. Once it was revealed that a high-profile tech company paid for the billboards, the move sparked a fresh round of debate about how far brands will go with their marketing in this town.
What callers heard
Anyone who punched in 1-231-HIT-US-UP was greeted by a recording that offers a menu of office soundscapes, including a coworker bringing a dog to the office and four full minutes of “office ASMR,” then invites people to leave a message. The recording ends with a wink: To return to a feeling of existential AI dread, simply hang up.
The San Francisco Standard reported that thousands of people have called, and roughly 200 have left voicemails. Notion told the outlet it does not plan to release the messages and instead sees the recordings as a kind of snapshot of how people feel about automation right now.
Notion's AI push
The billboard experiment lines up neatly with a broader shift inside Notion to turn its workspace into a hub for AI agents. The company has been rolling out features that let teams build and orchestrate “Custom Agents” and plug in external agents, too, according to TechCrunch. Notion’s own product pages describe an aggressive push on agent features this year, which the company repeatedly frames as augmenting human work rather than replacing it. Viewed against that backdrop, it is easier to see why Notion would both tap into and try to cool off local anxiety about AI.
Why the ads land here
San Francisco’s streets have quietly turned into an outdoor gallery of AI messaging, with local reporters and mapping projects tracking hundreds of AI-themed billboards across the city. A project from the San Francisco Chronicle charted the spread of AI advertising, and KQED has explored how these signs mirror and amplify fears around automation and layoffs. In a landscape saturated with loud creative, marketers say that a bit of provocation can be the most reliable way to get people talking.
The “AI Dread?” campaign underscores how much of today’s AI marketing walks a tightrope, acknowledging public unease while casting the company’s tools as the soothing antidote. In a city where billboards double as dinner table conversation starters, Notion’s hotline seems to have landed exactly where its backers likely wanted it, right in the center of the local discourse.
